


happy endings (and how they begin)

by graffitismoak



Category: Arrow (TV 2012)
Genre: F/M, No reunion, angsty angst, but still there so be wary, father/son bonding, felicity is alive but oliver still doesn't know by the end so don't read if you want heavy olicity, felicity is mentioned a lot tho, light self harm and even lighter suicidal ideation, sort of happy ending but also sad?, there's more people mentioned but whatever
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-05-25
Updated: 2017-05-25
Packaged: 2018-11-04 17:54:00
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,368
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/10995963
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/graffitismoak/pseuds/graffitismoak
Summary: How Oliver reacts to the death of his family, and how him and William move forward. Post Season 5 finale spec.(This fic is going along with the possibility that the team is missing for 5 months after the Season 5 finale, as opposed to him finding them right away).





	happy endings (and how they begin)

**Author's Note:**

> Mostly, Oliver has to mourn. As I said in the tags, it does not end with Oliver finding out the team is alive, but there's obviously the unspoken implication that they're alive somewhere, he just doesn't know. 
> 
> Would like to reiterate, there's super light self-harm, just in case you're easily triggered.
> 
> I will probably be going over it to edit tomorrow, because I'm exhausted, but enjoy anyways, even with all the mistakes.

When he sees the bombs go off, she's the last person he truly thinks of. There's a flicker of her face in the morning, the feeling of ten arrows lodged in his gut, and then it flickers away as fast as it came, just like the bile in his throat. Then it's John, and his son, who's now fatherless. Then, it's Thea, his baby sister, who was too young when all of the pain started. Then, it's Quentin, who Oliver thinks finally might be proud of the man he's become.

And then Rene (who's daughter will probably spend the rest of her life thinking her father didn't want her), and Dinah (how no one will ever learn that she was the only worthy apprentice to the Black Canary mantle), and Evelyn (how no one will ever know the way he does how worthy she was of redemption; that she was only a child, and how much like Thea she was), and Curtis (how Paul will regret forgetting what he smells like, and tastes like, and feels like), and Nyssa (who never got the happy ending she deserved), and Slade and Malcolm (who both, frankly, deserved every limb that got blown off, but who Oliver couldn't help but mourn anyways), and Samantha (whose son would never get to say goodbye. Oliver can only thank God that William didn't have to witness her death the way that he did his mother's).

And _then_ he thinks of Felicity – his Felicity – and it hurts all over again. He feels numb for a second, and he knows that he thinks of her last because he hasn't truly accepted that she was on that island with them. He heard her on the comms minutes before the island exploded. So, she's at the bunker. She's safe. She's safe. 

She's dead. 

But he pictures her at the bunker anyways. He pictures her spinning around in her chair, rambling off about a perp he's supposed to be chasing down. Pictures her smiling down at him from the salmon ladder. Pictures her smiling up at him from the training mats. Pictures the tears in her eyes as she tells him she needs space, how beautiful she'd looked, even then, when she was walking away from him. 

The feel of her lips on his. The future he tasted on her tongue.

He can't hear anything and his mouth feels like it's filled with cotton. He's vaguely aware of the ache in his throat from the sobs ripping from his chest, and a wetness on both his cheeks and his neck. He can feel William shaking against him with sobs, too, face buried in his shoulder.

He feels her name coming from his own mouth, and it hurts to hear it, but it's the only way he knows how to pray anymore. 

Logically he knows he needs to get William home to safety, after he looks for remains (however futile that seems), but instead he looks up at the sky ( _a night under the stars_ , he thinks) and tries to remember how she felt in his arms. There won't even be a body. 

He'll never see her face again. 

•  
•

Oliver doesn't know how, but at some point he gets them home. 

By home he means the loft. Of course he means the loft. Because she – _them_ – is home, and this is the closest thing to her. It hurts being there, but he knows it's best for William. He makes food and tries to get the boy to eat some, but he seems to throw up more than he gets down. 

Oliver waits for William to fall asleep in the guest bedroom before he goes up into their old bedroom (he'd lain with him, rubbing his back like his own mother had done, until the tears stopped and the exhaustion forced sleep upon his small body).

He breaks down again when he sees that she's put one of the pictures of their road trip back onto her nightstand. Then he throws it across the room. Then he goes over to pick it up, but presses his hand into the broken glass of the frame as hard as he can instead. 

He's staring at the blood staining their floor, contemplating the gun he knows she keeps tucked under the mattress, when a scream tears through the apartment, and then he's running downstairs again to fend off the night terrors.

Or to sit through them and watch his son become a reflection of the man he is. 

•  
•

It takes them a couple weeks to get into a routine. Mostly it's just silence, neither of them wanting to address the world outside of the apartment, but sometimes Will asks what's for supper (neither of them are eating much, but he's pushing Oliver to eat  
just as much as Oliver is pushing him), or if he wants to watch a movie. 

Sometimes Oliver stares at him too long and sees John in his eyes, or Thea in his smile. Or Felicity in the quiet between them. 

One night, about a month after the island, William makes a reference to some nerdy movie that Oliver used to make fun of her about. At first, he laughs. The laugh turns to sobs, and William holds him and rubs his back, just like his father taught him to do. 

After that, William asks about her. When he'd first started, Oliver had mostly stared blankly at the fridge, or the wall, or the counter, but eventually he starts answering. Slowly at the beginning, his voice almost inaudible, but as time goes by, he speaks louder and longer, telling stories about their time away, about the times she'd told him off, and all the times his head had been too far up his ass to realize he was in love with her. Sometimes he cries, sometimes he doesn't. He definitely cries when he tells Will about the pregnancy scare they had in Bali; how he'd acted calm, but secretly wanted to scream that _'this is everything I have ever wanted'_ from the rooftops. At first he cries because he's thinking of her small smile before they'd checked the test, but then he cries because he remembers he'll never see that smile on a different face; one in a crib or a stroller or a high chair. He cries at the flicker of disappointment on her face when she saw the negative sign that'd matched the disappointment in his chest. 

He asks about the others, too, but Oliver finds it easier to talk about Felicity, for some reason; about all the things they did and didn't do. And William likes to hear about her. Loves it, even. Oliver starts asking about Samantha, too. It's as slow a process as it had been for him, but he waits as long as he needs to.

Soon, it becomes a new normal for them. They bring the ones they'd lost up during dinner, talk about movie characters that remind them of their fallen family. Oliver learns that telling Will stories before bed helps ward off the nightmares, so he comes to start telling stories about things the team had done, all the bad guys they'd defeated (he'd been scared at first, to acknowledge that part of himself in front of William, but he'd learned quickly that he was nothing but a hero in his son's eyes).

Oliver strokes the boy's hair as he falls asleep to the romanticized version of The Count.

The hero's gaze drifts to the pictures of both Felicity and Samantha on the nightstand, and he smiles.

Things will never _really_ be okay, at least not for him – not without Felicity, or John, or Thea – but they'll get better. 

William will learn to live in a world without his mother, and Oliver will learn to live in a world with a new family; a family of two, but a family nonetheless. 

So, he smiles, and he cries, because they can both do this. They can both survive this new island they've found themselves stranded on. 

And in this story, the son's future will be the one he chooses, not the one thrust upon him. 

This story will have a happy ending.

**Author's Note:**

> Hope you enjoyed. Reviews are always great.


End file.
